The foundation of the abbey of Cluny in Burgundy in 910 by Abbot Berno and Duke William of Aquitaine was the first step in the creation of the congregation of Cluny. Cluny placed itself directly under the protection of the papacy and eventually became head of a grouping of several hundred monasteries following the Benedictine Rule and its own 'customs' (supplementary usages). Another important congregation, also Benedictine in basis, but with different emphases from Cluny was launched in 933 with the reform of Gorze. Brogne brought Benedictine observance to several Flemish monasteries. In England, between 940 and the 980s Dunstan, Ethelwold and Oswald, with the backing of the Wessex kings, began a reform at Abingdon and Glastonbury which was partly influenced by the Continent (Fleury, Ghent, Cluny and Gorze) and which led to the composition of the Regularis Concordia.
At the beginning of the eleventh century, Romuald of Ravenna became the father of an organized eremitical life; after spending time as a hermit in the area of Venice and travelling to the Benedictine house of Cuxa in the Pyrenees, he returned to north-eastern Italy and founded monasteries and hermitages. The most famous of these was Camaldoli, which combined a sort of lavra for hermits with a cenobium which acted as a buffer between the hermits and the world. A similar organization characterized Fonte Avellana, of which the reformer, Peter Damian, was prior. Around 1039, John Gualbert founded the house— later the congregation—of Vallombrosa, which adhered strictly to the Rule of St Benedict, and was grouped on federal lines. The foundation of the Grande Chartreuse by Bruno of Rheims in 1084 marked the beginning of an order which, by the early twelfth century, had both eremitic and cenobitic characteristics: the monks lived an austere contemplative life, keeping largely to individual cells which were ranged around a cloister. The idea of a common life for canons, hitherto strongest in the empire, gained fresh impetus in France and Italy with the foundation of the influential houses of St Ruf and St Frediano.
M. Dunn
Episcopal Sees in Europe at the End of the Tenth Century
The martyrdom on the Baltic of Adalbert, bishop of Prague at the hands of the Prussians in 997 marked the drawing to a close of more than two centuries of sustained missionary activity, which gradually brought about the conversion of the pagans of northern and central Europe. The persistent threat that had hitherto been posed to Christian Europe by these pagans, Vikings and Slavs, with all the trouble they had brought on the Church, was coming to an end as their rulers chose to adopt Christianity. What was to follow was a period of consolidation and reform, at length led by the papacy, during which the process of Christianization was advanced throughout the territories inhabited by both the old and the new adherents of the Latin Church.
Politics and religion were closely intertwined on the frontiers of the German kingdom, as its rulers sought to dominate the nascent churches of neighbouring peoples. Missionaries were sent forth from the province of Hamburg-Bremen in the north to convert the Danes, which resulted in the creation of several new sees in the mid-tenth century. Otto I's pet project in this field was the archbishopric of Magdeburg, which was founded in 968 in the wake of the German settlement of the lands between the Elbe and the Oder, and a new see was erected in the heart of Polish territory at Poznan as a suffragan to it. But with the creation of the metropolitan see of Gniezno in 1000 Poland obtained a Church independent of German control, just as politically it remained outwith the bounds of the empire, though for a short time jurisdiction over Poznan was retained by the German archbishop. The Hungarian experience was similar. It was the Bavarian province of Salzburg that was most active in the evangelization of the Bohemians, Moravians and Hungarians. The Bohemian diocese of Prague (973) was subjected to Mainz and remained so until the fourteenth century, but Hungary like Poland achieved an independent Church with the creation of the metropolitan see of Esztergom in 1001.
The eastern and western churches were in competition with one another for the allegiance of the Slavs, and while Rome had gained most of central Europe, the Byzantines had successfully established the Bulgarian and, more recently, the Russian Churches. Tension between Latins and Greeks, due to complex reasons of which theological differences were a part, was most evident in southern Italy. Here the Byzantines held sway over Apulia, Basilicata and Calabria, with a considerable Greek population in the extreme south, which belonged to the patriarchate of Constantinople. On the western side of the peninsula the Lombards of Campania observed the Latin rite. The German Ottonian emperors (962-1002) had ambitions to wrest the region from Byzantine control, which would have effected its union with the Roman or western patriarchate, but it was not until some years after the Norman conquest that the entire south was subordinated to Rome. By 1000 there were five southern Italian provinces in the Constantinopolitan obedience: Reggio di Calabria, St Severina, Otranto, Taranto and Brindisi-Oria. Apulia was an area of mixed population and technically pertained to Rome. Nevertheless, the metropolitans of the province of Bari-Canosa were as likely to recognize the authority of Constantinople as that of Rome, and from the mid-tenth century they frequently also held the archbishopric of Brindisi-Oria. Moreover, the decision to erect the archbishopric of Trani (by 987) was taken in Constantinople rather than Rome and may have been a reaction against Rome's creation of the province of Benevento in 969. Pope John XIII, at the request of Otto I, seems to have expressly established Benevento, with its many suffragans, as a Latin outpost. The same at least might be said of Salerno, if indeed its foundation cannot be described as an outright attempt to eat into the Greek patriarchate. In 989 John XV gave the new archbishop jurisdiction over Acerenza and the Calabrian sees of Bisignano, Malvito and Cosenza. Acerenza, although also technically belonging to Rome, had already been assigned with four other sees to the province of Otranto by Polyeuctes, patriarch of Constantinople in 968, and Bisignano, Malvito and Cosenza had at the beginning of the tenth century been listed among the suffragans of Reggio di Calabria. Continual confirmation of these sees to Salerno by successive popes casts some doubt on the ability of the archbishops to command the obedience of their occupants, and such difficulties probably lay behind the Norman Robert Guiscard's agreement with Nicholas II in 1059 to subject the churches of any territories he might conquer to Rome. In any event, Acerenza and Cosenza were erected into metropolitans by the mid-eleventh century, and Bisignano and Malvito were made immediately subject to Rome by the mid-twelfth.
From the early eighth century the chief threat to the Christian church in the Mediterranean was Islam. As well as the greater part of the Iberian peninsula and its outlying islands, the Arabs held Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and these were used as bases to harry the coasts of Europe. In the early eleventh century the Pisans and Genoese cleared them out of Sardinia and Corsica, and by the 1070s the Normans had taken control of Sicily. In Spain provincial organization had broken down as a result of the Muslim conquest. The surviving sees of Catalonia, which had formerly belonged to the province of Tarragona, were eventually attached to that of Narbonne across the Pyrenees, but elsewhere in the Christian north the bishops were not formally subjected to any metropolitan authority until the end of the eleventh century. Nevertheless, in the kingdom of Asturias-Leon the bishop whose see was to be found in the same place as the seat of royal power, first Lugo, then Oviedo and finally Leon, performed the functions of and was in all but name the metropolitan. Similarly, in the eleventh century the bishop of Jaca was known in official documents as bishop of Aragon, and the bishop of Burgos as bishop of Castile. These associations point clearly to the great degree of control the Spanish Christian rulers maintained over ecclesiastical affairs. As the old centres of metropolitan authority were taken from the Muslims during the course of the Reconquista,
Provincial organization in the normal way was re-established: at Toledo in 1088, at Tarragona in 1091, and at Braga in 1104. In addition, the growing importance and prestige of Santiago de Compostela as a place of pilgrimage made it, too, a natural site for an archiepiscopal see (1120).
North of the Pyrenees the provincial boundaries that had come into being in the Frankish kingdoms by the early ninth century remained unaltered until the later Middle Ages. Under Charlemagne metropolitan authority was reaffirmed in 779, and he furthermore favoured metropolitan bishops' assumption of the honorific title of archbishop, which had earlier been accorded to the missionary Boniface by Pope Gregory III. Those sees that had been disrupted by the Viking invasions were by 1000 all restored. In England the two provinces of Canterbury and York established at the end of the sixth and seventh centuries remained, but the distribution of episcopal sees had been worse affected here with the permanent loss of several and was soon to be changed to some extent by the Normans. In Wales and Scotland a territorial episcopate had not yet completely emerged, and only at St Davids and St Andrews were there undoubtedly bishops' sees of this kind. Its full development took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries under Norman influence. Similarly, the territorial division of Ireland into dioceses and provinces was not begun until the mid-twelfth century.
R. K.Rose
The Influx of Relics into Saxony
Between 772 and 804, in a long series of bloody campaigns, Charlemagne subjugated the pagan Saxons. A natural corollary to the conquest was a programme of missionary activity and the creation of an ecclesiastical establishment. The heart of Christianity, however, was not formal ecclesiastical structures, but rather the cult of the saints and their wonder-working bones. The conversion of the Saxons required the importation of relics, holy bones, from places where they existed in some abundance, such as the churches of northern Francia and, especially, Rome. New monasteries like Corvey and new sees like Hildesheim had to possess such relics as a focus for local devotion and a source of supernatural power. 'The populace can be turned from their superstitions most easily if the body of some famous saint be brought here', remarked one contemporary Saxon bishop. In 851 the Saxon noble Waltbraht brought the bones of St Alexander from Rome to his monastery at Wildeshausen. The conversion was obviously sending down roots, for Waltbraht was the grandson of Widukind, the hero of the Saxon opposition to Charlemagne.
R. Bartlett
World History
